


If You Die, Take Me With You

by Batsymomma11



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Superman (Comics), Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Best Friends, Blood and Violence, Brothers, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Near Death Experiences, kryptonite poisoning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-11 20:44:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15980150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Batsymomma11/pseuds/Batsymomma11
Summary: "My eyes flutter, moth wings to flame, and I feel a knife of fear lance through my middle when I realize I may never open my eyes again if they close. These little shreds of papery seconds, may be my last. I cling, clawing at the ground with numb fingers, as if to hold onto the air and my world sharpens to needles. The needles are even more lethal than the pain that is all-encompassing. They force the pain away until there is nothing but a dull ache. Somewhere in the back of my conscious mind, I recognize this as the last dregs of my body’s attempts to save me."Clark is found on the verge of death and Bruce feels wrecked over the possibility of losing him.





	If You Die, Take Me With You

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this because I was felt like I needed to get some of my own dark out. It's depressing, but it's what I was feeling today.   
> I do not own DC or its characters. I do own this story.   
> Thank you for reading and enjoy!

**Superman**

There’s a weight on my chest. Hard, unforgiving, and cold. A frigid unfeeling creature with claws dug in deep into the sinew and bone.

Blood, drip, drip, drips down my arms and legs, over my ribs and into the hollow of my throat, little rivers of woe and I lie motionless, letting the life drain out of me. Letting the cold take over.

I’m shaking.

Hands quivering, body fighting some unknown enemy though the enemy is within and I take start to lose track of time. How much has gone by? Will anyone see me? Will anyone come for me?

The ice is crystalizing in my veins, flash-freezing the tissue it touches as it moves from fingers and toes to arms and legs, to the center of my body where my heart feebly puts up its last fight.

Darkness.

Smothering darkness is here. All around me, I feel it press inwards and I realize this is where the weight came from. The weight that presses down into my sternum, like knuckles grinding over bone. It sinks into me and sighs. I barely put up a fight now. I barely move at all.

Death is coming for me now.

And I should be afraid. I should be so afraid because I don’t know here I’m going and the air is getting thicker, like sludge funneling into my nose and mouth. I’m making gasping sounds, gurgling around blood filled lungs and I have to focus just to draw in each one. Just to keep living though it feels less and less like I should. Why bother? No one is coming to save me. No one will make it on time. No one can. Only I would be able to and there is no one else like me. No one else even remotely like myself on this green and blue orb I call home.

I should have seen it coming. I should have stopped _him._ But he surprised me. Dressed like a homeless man prepared to jump off a bridge, wearing grease smeared clothes and a wig. It was a pitifully cheap costume, if I’d only bothered to really study the man. To really question his motives, like the Bat might have.

I fell hard for the crocodile tears and the sobbing. I leapt before looking, desperate to save a soul from being lost in the harbor, merely another skeleton among the many lost and forgotten. And he’d shot me with the lethal grace of a hunter. Not an ounce of regret. Not a twitch of misgiving. Just hard, cold, resolve.

_He’d_ shot me with a gun that he’d kept beneath the folds of his thick woolen coat, something I would have seen had I bothered to look. But I’ve always been too soft. Foolishly hopeful in humanity’s goodness.

Batman would be disappointed in me.

My eyes flutter, moth wings to flame, and I feel a knife of fear lance through my middle when I realize I may never open my eyes again if they close. These little shreds of papery seconds, may be my last. I cling, clawing at the ground with numb fingers, as if to hold onto the air and my world sharpens to needles. The needles are even more lethal than the pain that is all-encompassing. They force the pain away until there is nothing but a dull ache. Somewhere in the back of my conscious mind, I recognize this as the last dregs of my body’s attempts to save me.

But I’m not going to heal this time. My body cannot sustain this sort of damage and recover without help. And there is no help for me.

Time slows, and I slip like oil through the gossamer folds of it, a weary wraith who has put up a good fight but is ready to go. I’m ready, I realize softly. Ready to take my last breath and let go.

I’m so tired.

“Clark.”

The name is under water and I am buried leagues beneath it. Drowning, I’m drowning in the crimson tides, swept under and rolled tightly into a ball by the undercurrents.

“Clark, stay with me. Please—”

“I—an’t”

Slurring words. I can’t speak right. I can’t see anything, it’s so very dark in here. Smothering. I’m being smothered and I can’t breathe and I can’t speak. I’m suddenly scared again and the fetid warmth I imagined before, was a lie. It’s not warm at all, but blister cold, like forcing ice chips under your nails.

I’m being moved, and the pain comes rushing up the back of my throat, burning my nose as I wretch all over myself. My eyes water, the darkness wavers and I catch flecks of light, a blurred face and warm firm hands as they gather me close.

“elp, me,” I choke, lips slack and strange, limbs too weak to wipe the wet off my chin.

“Hold on. Please Clark. Hold on.”

“B,” I gargle around the copper in my mouth and catch leathery fabric being wrapped around me, tightening so abruptly its like being swaddled by steel. I groan at the intrusive pain it causes and those firm hands are on my shoulders, drawing me back to a heat that makes tears run from eyes. When darkness swamps over my head and neck, I can’t stop it.

 

**Batman**

He’s been out for thirty-six hours and I’ve only left his side to piss or to shove something into my mouth for the sake of staying conscious. I can’t move. I can’t even think past the next breath because it makes me want to scream and screaming would rip me in two, spilling my innards all over the hard-packed ice of this fortress. I would die, just like Clark was going to. Just like he still might.

The dark thought comes as it has before, and I trace it like a lover in my mind, unwilling to let it go. _If you die, take me with you. I’m not ready to lose you. I can’t lose you._

When I’d found him laying in a pool of blood any earthly human should have been dead from, I’d been struck stupid. For the first time in my life, I hadn’t acted, I’d simply stared for a solid five seconds, mouth agape, heart somewhere in the back of my throat making me choke on air.

He’d never looked so gray. His skin, waxen and colorless, eyes closed, one breath so far apart from the next, I almost thought him gone already.

I hadn’t simply felt fear at the sight of my best friend, my brother, my partner like that, I’d felt terror.

I still feel it. Clawing at my insides, rattling around like a fucking gremlin desperate for escape and mayhem and all I want to do is to give it free rein. Because it’s been thirty-six hours and Clark still isn’t awake. He’s not opened his eyes or said anything else past the garbled attempt at speech he’d given me when I’d first happened upon him.

I still don’t know all the details. I don’t know if I can handle them now, even if I wanted to.

His distress beacon went off, sharp and shrill in my ear piercing the darkness of my bedroom like a hot-knife through butter. I’d been out of bed so quickly, I hadn’t even thought to call anyone else. I’d simply acted. I’d done what I do best. I put on the Bat and shot out of the cave in a frenzy of crippling energy.

His beacon went off in an abandoned lot of Metropolis, by the Metro bridge that connects to Gotham above the roiling harbor, somewhere Clark Kent never would have gone, and Superman had no purpose. It made no sense. I didn’t care at the time.

I only cared about getting there before it was too late.

I knew, in the place between gut and sense, that Clark was dying and would leave me if I didn’t hurry.

But nothing prepared me to find him the way I did. It was like he’d been shot by a grenade of kryptonite. His skin was shredded from pelvis to neck, pulpy flesh torn open, stomach eviscerated, skin flayed like someone had carved a turkey half-way and then stopped. Amidst the red and gore, there were hundreds of glowing green shrapnel, little agents of death. For once in my long career of blood and darkness, I’d felt sick.

There was nothing I could do except wrap him tightly into my cape and get him to his fortress. No human medicine was going to help, not with the extent of his injuries. They were too severe. He’d lost so much blood he already looked like a corpse by the time I got him into a medical pod. I’d stayed by his side, drenched in dried blood and Clark’s vomit for the first twelve hours. My muscles simply froze and wouldn’t unlock.

When he kept breathing, and the delicate thump of a badly bruised heart kept beating, I relented enough to bathe and eat. Then I returned.

I’ve remained locked in this convoluted vigil, determined to either by the first face he sees when he wakes, or the last, if he leaves me.

I handed everything I knew over to the league, though it was sadly little, and I’ve no idea of anything that’s going on outside these four walls. Such a strange concept, for a man that needs control to its maximum capacity.

I frown when Clark’s fingers flex and I reach to hold his hand. He doesn’t squeeze back, but I know he must feel that someone is here, taking care of him. Someone is here, waiting for him. Praying and crying over him.

“Come back Clark,” I try, throat dry and rough from days of being silent. He remains unmoved, face a blank cool slate, arms and legs slack beneath the folds of a heavily quilted blanket Ma Kent made when he was a boy.

“Come back.”

 

**Superman**

There is something in my hand. Warm, rough, hard.

Callouses and scars.

My mind curls around the feeling like a cat does a warm lap and I sigh into the feeling, gripping that hard thing until the image of a hand comes to mind. Someone is holding my hand and I know this hand. I know it well.

Callouses, because it works hard. It trains harder. It can hold a man fifty floors above the earth with minimal sweat and then suture a wound with flawless finesse in the next breath.

Scars, because this hand has been hurt before. Because it will be hurt again and because it is feebly human, though it doesn’t want to be.

_Bruce._

Friend, ally, brother. The man who I call when everyone else has left and there is only me. The one who will always come, no matter the inconvenience, no matter the cost.

My eyes fight to open, and my lids feel glued shut. A groan bubbles up my throat and I weakly grip that hand again, willing it to understand I need help. I need help to open my eyes because suddenly I desperately need to see the face that belongs to that hand. Because I need to see that I’m alive. That I’m breathing, and this is real. It’s not a strange dream.

“Clark?”

_Yes_ , I want to wail, but all that comes out is a scratchy moan.

“I’m here, Clark. I’ve got you.”

_Don’t go._

“I’m right here.”

_Tell me it’s all going to be alright. Tell me I’m going to live. That this isn’t a goodbye._

The hand grips mine tighter, “Don’t be afraid Clark. I’m right here. Always.”

_Thank you._

 

I don’t remember drifting back into the blackness, but it must have happened because when I float back from the inky depths, I’m aware that more time has passed. The hand is gone.

The panic that flares wide like a gaping mouth in my middle is only scarcely quashed when I try to open my eyes again and this time, I manage it. The first thing I see is that it’s very dim in here. The lights are turned down to minimum, the crystals glowing a faint dull orange. I blink past the grit and can make out the faint beeping of monitors tracking my every move. We are in the fortress.  

My head throbs along with their steadily rising cadence, but I’m so pleased that I can open my eyes, it doesn’t register as pain. It registers as proof that I’m alive. That I survived. I slowly, meticulously survey the rest of the room, seeing everything exactly as it should be. Ma’s quilt is tucked up against my naked skin, the fabric soft and familiar. Though everything feels dulled down, like sifting through cotton, I can smell antiseptic and coppery blood in the air. I can smell death lingering in the room like a bad aftertaste and it makes the panic which hasn’t gone, just a tick more present.

Then Bruce walks into the room and we stare for a solid minute.

He walks around the bed, grabs my hand again, so tight it should hurt. But I’m healing, and it just feels like a tight, tight pressure on my knuckles. Like another sign that I lived.   

“Clark,” he whispers, his voice more choked with emotion than I’ve ever heard it before, “You’re awake.”

I nod, weakness swamping me in place of the panic and I stare at Bruce like a man starved for human contact. He looks exhausted. Nearly a full beard on his cheeks, dark circles and deep creases in his face. His coloring is poor and his eyes bloodshot. But he’s never looked better to a man who never thought he’d see anything ever again.

Something burns in the back of my throat, tingling my nose and stinging my eyes. I open my mouth to say something in return, because I want to say thank you. I want to tell him thank you for coming on time. For making it. For being the one to get there when no one else could. But only a half-broken sob comes tumbling out and Bruce is draping himself over me, a fiercely delicate embrace softening the sound in his shoulder.

I cling to him, like I did that day to the air, and he says words into my ear that sound like gibberish, because I’m crying now, and I can’t understand him. I’m too relieved. I’m too happy to be alive.

“You’re OK.”

“Yes,” I grind out, throat protesting the action horribly.

“You’re OK, Clark.”

I nod into his shoulder and believe him. Batman is almost never wrong.

 


End file.
